Overseas Frustration Grows Over U.S. Domestic Impasse on Climate Policy

From across oceans, environmental activists and national leaders watched with rapt attention this year as the U.S Congress passed health care legislation and an overhaul of financial regulations -- but not a climate bill.

"On the one hand the U.S. is leading the scientific field of climate change, and on the other hand there is this incredible difficulty to have a bipartisan agreement on climate change. It probably is something very deep in the U.S.," Lalonde said. "It's very, very peculiar. It's probably the fact that the United States was built on cheap energy."

Former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Frank Loy acknowledged that other countries are starting to lose faith in U.S. promises to cut emissions and said, "Some are asking something even more fundamental: Is the U.S. governable?"

"Those questions will be asked, and there is no way to avoid that," he said. "We do have a hard time passing major pieces of legislation. The president is not a prime minister."

But Loy, who served as the U.S. lead negotiator during the Clinton administration, said Obama can do a few key things to "minimize the hurt" and give America some credibility in the international negotiations. Top on the list: meeting the financial promise of Copenhagen to raise $30 billion by 2012, America's share of which he estimated to be around $6 billion.

"If we meet that task, I think that will do a lot to make it clear that while the administration was unable to get legislation, it remains serious in efforts to meet its obligations that it voluntarily took on," Loy said.

The administration currently is categorizing the emission reductions it believes will be achieved through new regulation on tailpipe emissions under the U.S. EPA so that it can show the country is on a glidepath toward achieving its emission promises. The problem, several pointed out, is how to assure nations that long-term emission goals can be met -- something much harder to achieve with regulation alone.

Few chips to bargain with

"Given the limitations of relying on the EPA, how credible will that claim be?" asked Alden Meyer, director of policy and strategy for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "That's a hard area when they get into long-term binding reduction goals. They basically have to argue that over time the U.S. political system will come to its senses and recognize the urgency of dealing with climate change."

U.S. climate change activists, meanwhile, are glumly trying to put the best face on Congress' failure to act on the climate bill.

Elliot Diringer, vice president for international strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said the lack of a bill "shouldn't stand in the way of reaching the decisions we need in Cancun." Diringer said he hoped countries could agree on a set of "strictly operational decisions" on things like technology, finance and transparency that would put countries in a better position to fulfill and be held accountable for their Copenhagen promises.

But he and others agreed that not having a bill undercuts America's leverage this year to get things it still wants, like a more transparent and accountable reporting system from countries like China and a larger role for the World Bank in delivering finance.

"If I'm China, I'm looking at this and saying, "What is the U.S. bringing to the table? ... Why should I move as quickly as they want me to?" Meyer said.

Jarju was even more blunt, saying America has effectively lost its ability to push countries to adopt the Copenhagen pact.

"The U.S. will not have any moral authority to pin people or to sell the Copenhagen Accord as if it is the Holy Bible or Koran," he said.

Mark Helmke, a senior aid to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), questioned whether a new global treaty will ever emerge, and said the cacophony of Copenhagen showed that the world might be better off fighting climate change outside the United Nations.

"Maybe the day of these grand, all-countries-involved treaties ... maybe we have to find a new approach," he said.